Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

Guess what? Close academic study of the presidential candidates reveals that the Democrats' site provided more information and participation opportunities, and were more professionally designed, than the Republicans'. OK, not a big surprise. More interesting and challenging: a report on how the Obama campaign in NY coped (badly) with communication overload in the weeks before the primary.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google and Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, spoke earlier today about technology, innovation, the economy, energy, and how they are all linked. Schmidt is on the short list for Obama's CTO, and he is a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, so here's an opportunity to learn a little about how he thinks on these topics, through a transcript from his talk.

Back in the day, when Yahoo! was the only search game in town, many wondered why Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), and eventually Google would attempt to break into that market. The answer continues to be the same - although they're good, there's still a lot to be done with Search. Contextual search is still being explored, and in terms of government and campaign information, most documents are not publicly or easily available to the search engines. With the goal of open government in mind, I decided to take a look at five relatively new search companies that recently launched sites, hoping that perhaps some of them could help make search of government and campaign data a little better, honing in on the FEC, OMB and more.

Somewhat astonishingly, for years now the European Union has managed to dole out a giant chunk of its operating budget -- some 40% -- in the form of farm subsidies under its Common Agricultural Policy, intended to help struggling farmers get along but often go to line the pockets of wealth-off growers, while never really revealing just who the €55 billion goes to enrich. But journalists and activists have, under freedom of information provisions, been beating down the doors of member state governments in attempts to get the subsidy data and then, importantly, make sense of it.

Thus, farmsubsidy.org.

That the Obama campaign has a meticulously-gathered collection of data on our shoe sizes and coffee preferences stored in some pulsating brain deep below Chicago should, writes New York Law School's James Grimmelmann in the New Republic, raise concerns...McClatchy's Frank Greve casts a healthily skeptical eye on what, beyond the jittery excitement, Change.gov truly amounts to. Former PdF keynoter and author Clay Shirky is notably enthusiastic, branding the transition site "obviously fantastic." But you can't help but keep from going all-in on when you hear things like what Greve got from Obama press aide Jen Psaki...Long-time activist on the left Bob Fertik, perhaps best known as the force behind Democrats.org, says the questions bubbling up on Change.gov's Open for Questions forum show that Americans haven't joined the media in the trap of obsessing over a scheming and bumbling floppy-haired Illinois governor whose name no one could pronounce last week...and more.

With the 111th session of Congress kicking off tomorrow and a mere 15 days until President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, getting his desired $700 billion (or so) stimulus package signed, sealed, and delivered before inauguration day would take a feat of super-human legislating. What could complicate that goal: a proposal promoted by top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell to put the stimulus plan online for a full week...Is it our turn yet? Pressure is building for Obama to finally name a Chief Technology Officer, the nation's first...The first round of Change.org's Ideas for Change in America contest, to which techPresident is a partner, has wrapped...and a good deal more.

My mom friended me on Facebook last week. This was the last decisive indicator that we've formally entered the Information Age.